On Monday 24th January 2011 the BBC announced that it would be restructuring its online department – with 360 job losses and the deletion of 200 of its top level directories (including the websites that live under them – eg http://www.bbc.co.uk/blast). 172 of of those top level directories are due to be deleted within the coming 12 months.

The purpose of this project is to show how the entire 172 public facing websites that are earmarked for deletion have been copied, archived, distributed and republished online – independently. Download: http://178.63.252.42/

Martin Bryant writing on the Thenextweb.com says; ” The BBC is set to close down 200 of its websites in the near future as part of cost-cutting measures. Hearing that 172 of these sites would be deleted from the Web entirely, an anonymous (and possibly even “Anonymous”, judging by the picture on the website) individual has taken matters into his or her own hands.

The result is a BitTorrent file that anyone can download to store a backup of these “lost” websites forever. The cost of the project? Apparently no more that $3.99 for a VPS server to crawl and retrieve all the sites.”